Harlan County – Episode 13 – The Oxford Comment

The Oxford Comment

This week the IFC is playing Barbara Kopple’s Oscar winning film Harlan County USA, so we thought it would be a good time to share an interview with Alessandro Portelli, the oral historian who spent 25 years gathering the stories of the Appalachian community subject in Kopple’s film. The people of Harlan are mostly known for their history of intense labor battles (and thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, short temperament), but Portelli says they are most remarkable for their incredible will to survive.

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Leading oral historian Alessandro Portelli is Professor of American Literature at the University of Rome-La Sapienza. In 1973 he recorded the first of over 150 interviews with the men and women of Harlan County, which are now available in the volume, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History.

THE BATTLE OF CRUMMIES CREEK

From interviews included in They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History, by Alessandro Portelli, published last month by Oxford University Press. On April 15, 1941, during a national coal miners’ strike, four striking miners entered the company store at the Crummies Creek Coal Co., in Harlan County, Kentucky, and were killed by a mine employee with a machine gun. Locals have long claimed, though it has never been confirmed, that an ensuing gunfight resulted in additional deaths on both sides.

Granny Hager: Crummies Creek. Now, there was killing there and I can’t tell you just how many were killed. You see, I used to have all of that down, but it got washed away so many times, and burned out. I don’t know all that did happen, but they really had a battle up there. I think there was five killed. They wanted the scabs to go on to work, and they wanted to run the union men away, you see. And that is what started the battle. Now that was the roughest place we had in Harlan County.

Plennie Hall: The day before the battle, I went into the office and I told Mr. Johnson, “Mr.Johnson,” I says, “won’t you sign the union? It would be good for everybody, to be satisfied with everything.” And he said, “Hell no”; he wouldn’t under no circumstances. And the next day, the union come up there to stop them from working.

Becky Simpson: Six years old. Me and my mother always walked from Cranks Creek to Crummies to the commissary with my dad’s paycheck. They had a bunch of pickets up at the commissary. This big bald-headed guy, they called him Big Jim Black Hair, he was a big-league ballplayer, he told my mother, “What’re you doing here with this child today? Get what little you’re going to and get this child back out, there’s gon’ be trouble today.” As we was leaving the commissary, they was rolling up these big machine guns, that they could open up the double doors and shoot out. So me and Mommy is walking back up the mountain, we heared the shooting start. And they just mowed the men down.

Ben Campagnari: Now, we were running, and we had a pegleg man. You wouldn’t believe it. Going down that railroad track, and he’s hitting about four ties at a time; and he outrun half of the people that had good legs, and we was all a-running because they was cutting down with the machine gun, or trying to. And I said: “If I ever go on a picket line again, I’ll go with protection.” We died
just like ducks.

Hazel Leonard: And that night, the thugs that lived, they carried all their dead men out of there and hauled them to the top of Crummies mountain, and burned them up. There was a place there, that they called the Halfway House, it was just a dive, you know, just for men to drink and hang out at. And they sold booze and everything, you know what I mean. So they hauled all these people out there, that had got killed that night—the thugs. They hauled them up that mountain to that place and then they burned it. They burned them up.

Plennie Hall: Three weeks later I was over there getting a payday, and there was a drainpipe runs down there, and somebody that crawled in that drainpipe and died, the dogs pulled out some of his bones. There never was no more said about it. I wondered about who that could have been, or where they were from.

They Say in Harlan County is not a book about coal miners so much as a dialogue in which more than 150 Harlan County women and men tell the story of their region, from pioneer times through the dramatic strikes of the 1930s and '70s, up to the present. Alessandro Portelli draws on 25 years of original interviews to take readers into the mines and inside the lives of those who work, suffer, and often die in them--from black lung, falling rock, suffocation, or simply from work that can be literally backbreaking. Alessandro Portelli is Professor of American Literature at the University of Rome-La Sapienza. He is the author of The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Form and Meaning in Oral History; The Text and the Voice: Speaking, Writing, and Democracy in American Literature; The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue; and The Order Has Already Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, which won Italy's prestigious Viareggio Book Prize.

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Recent Comments

My father Charles Henry Noe was a miner who worked at Crummies Creek mines He was at the “Battle of Crummies Creek.”
He told me that miners were in the company store “milling around some arguments or a confrontation occurred and the butcher put a machine on the counter and began firing.
after that it was like a war with men on both sides shootig at each other. According to him the company or the C.O.A. had imported armed thugs from Chicago to fight the miners, they arrived in ambulanceswho had arrived under the pretense of picking up the wounded. not many of them made it back.